Heroes of Neverwinter is a significant launch for Atari, being a major Facebook initiative. However, it's just one part of a larger campaign, as Director of Product Marketing for Atari Peter Banks details.
“That's a cool and fun thing about this multimedia launch,” said Banks. “We have one primary audience: D&D enthusiasts and once you go beyond that, you look at the different audiences for different platforms. There's the super engaged people at game hobby stores, trade paperbacks are at bookstores and at airports, there's the Cryptic title for core PC gamers, and then there's Heroes of Neverwinter and that’s new territory with a broader audience so the funny thing with the campaign is that it's like a sun or a flower - the center is saturated but the other sectors are seeing their own concentration."
“The stuff that's new for us and new for me, it's just thinking about the new audience - we were so focused on the core gaming demographic with GameStop and the Game Informers where the big game audiences will be, but at the same time, we have these dynamic tools with Facebook where you can see all the metrics, where users are getting in for the mass media,” he added. “We can really make the game and change it so quickly. You can see we have a dedicated group of people and address those issues."
“It leads into the whole idea of this games business going from a product to a service and we have experience from doing it in Test Drive Unlimited 2 and Star Trek Online and Champions Online so this is a natural evolution for us,” asserted Banks.
Check out the full interview on [a]list daily.
